Point Reyes Light - December 14, 2000
Guest Column
What Commonweal does in Bolinas
By Michael Lerner, President, Commonweal, Bolinas
Point Reyes Light editor Dave Mitchell was kind enough to invite me to describe Commonweal’s work in this guest column. Here is my best attempt.
Commonweal is a health-and-environmental-research institute located on a 60-acre site at the old RCA Transmitting Station near Bolinas in the Point Reyes National Seashore. For 25 years, a community of West Marin residents and other – primarily Marin – residents, have worked together at Commonweal. Our goal is to serve young people with learning disabilities, mental illnesses, and other neurophysiological disorders; adults with cancer plus health professionals who work with people with life-threatening illnesses; we also seek to preserve the global environment. Shorthand: Commonweal works with kids, cancer, health professionals, and the environment.
Helping people with cancer
Commonweal is best known for our work with people with cancer. Right now we are in our 97th week-long Commonweal Cancer Help Program. Eight people with cancer, all under the care of physicians at home, are experiencing a week of yoga, meditation, massage, vegetarian diets, support groups, and discussions of choices in healing, mainstream and complementary therapies, pain control, and death and dying.
Directed by Waz Thomas and documented by Bill Moyers in his PBS series Healing and the Mind, the Cancer Help Program has influenced cancer programs across the country including Virginia Veach's T’Ing-Sha Cancer Help Program in Inverness and the Smith Farm Cancer Help Program in Washington, DC.
I have participated in 108 of these programs at Commonweal, Smith Farm, T’Ing-Sha, and elsewhere. It has been the most rewarding work of my life. These weeks so palpably and so often profoundly relieve suffering, help people to be skillful in the fight for life, and help them to face the prospect of death as well.
Medical education for professionals
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, author of the best-seller Kitchen Table Wisdom, is medical director of the Cancer Help Program and also directs ISHI, the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal.
The institute offers transformational continuing-medical-education programs for physicians, as well as programs for UCSF medical students and other health professionals who work with people with life-threatening illnesses. Rachel's work has also deeply touched the lives of many thousands of health professionals and lay people alike.
Juvenile justice programs
Our programs for at-risk young people also change lives. Commonweal co-founder Carolyn Brown, former chair of the California Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Advisory Committee, directs the children-and-young-adults program. Carolyn, who last month was awarded the Albert Elias Award by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for three decades of extraordinary work, has made a great difference in the lives of thousands of Marin and Bay Area young people.
Attorney David Steinhart, director of the juvenile-justice program, is widely considered one of the leading advocates for California juvenile justice and has shaped that field for decades.
Environmental work
In our environmental work, Commonweal co-founder Burr Heneman directs the California Ocean Policy Reform Project. Burr is the intellectual author of several key bills that together constitute the most important legislation in 50 years protecting the California ocean and coastline. He has done as much to protect the California ocean and coast as anyone in California.
Commonweal has worked for over two decades to rid the world of toxic chemicals. We believe these chemicals play an important role in many of the cancers of adults, as well as learning and behavior disorders among the young people whom we work with in our direct service programs.
Sharyle Patton, director of the health-and-environment program, is in South Africa right now fighting for the strongest possible UN treaty to ban the 12 most toxic chemicals on earth. Sharyle co-chairs the International POPS Elimination Network, the network of 300 citizen organizations that has been the world's conscience for a strong treaty. Commonweal’s primary role in the UN POPS treaty process has been to bring leading scientists to the negotiations to educate government delegates.
Fighting toxic-chemical use
Davis Baltz is California coordinator for Health Care Without Harm: The Campaign for Environmentally Responsible Health Care. HCWH is also an international network of more than 300 organizations working to end dioxin, mercury, and other forms of chemical contamination in the healthcare system. HCWH began at Commonweal four years ago. It is widely considered one of the most successful grassroots based toxics campaigns in over a decade.
Brother pushed RCA for cleanup
Research director Steve Lerner, now based in Washington, DC, began Commonweal’s work on chemicals and health with a research program in the 1970s. Steve called in the EPA and OSHA to assess toxics left on the site by RCA Global Communications. As these agencies initially moved slowly, Steve went on television to push for the major cleanup effort that followed.
Steve has written seven books for Commonweal. His best known book, Eco-Pioneers (MIT), describes pioneers of sustainable development working in communities across America.
Those are just some of the people at Commonweal who work together to do what we can in these difficult times. We welcome your interest in our work.
Editor’s note: Michael Lerner is president and co-founder of Commonweal and the Smith Farm Center for the Healing Arts in Washington, DC. He also works with foundations focused on biodiversity and environmental health. A former Yale faculty member, he is the author of "Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer" (MIT) as well as the working paper "The Age of Extinctions and the Emerging Environmental Health Movement," both on the web at <www.commonweal.org>. He received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983.